1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates computer-based techniques for manipulating video data. More specifically, the present invention relates to a computer-based technique for automatically summarizing a video.
2. Related Art
The recent proliferation of high-bandwidth Internet connections and associated developments in content-distribution technologies presently make it possible for millions of users to efficiently access video content on the Internet. These developments have led to a tremendous increase in the amount of video content that is being downloaded from the Internet. Internet users routinely view video clips from numerous web sites and portals to obtain various types of information and entertainment. At the same time, a number of video-sharing web sites have been recently launched, which are dedicated to sharing and distributing video clips.
Unlike other distribution channels for video content, the Internet enables consumers to preview short summaries of videos. This enables a consumer to obtain more information about a video before viewing and/or buying the entire video.
However, generating an effective summary for a video is a challenging a task. A summary should ideally be an interesting and representative version of the original video, so that the viewer is motivated to view or buy the original video. At present, the process of generating summaries is an extremely time-consuming manual process, which is impractical for more than a small number of videos.
Hence, what is needed is a method and an apparatus for automatically summarizing a video without the above-described problems.